Post-Conflict and Culture: Changing America's Military for 21st Century Missions

About the Author

James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.Vice President for the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, and the E. W. Richardson Fellow

I
want to thank Admiral Arthur Cebrowski and his team at the Defense
Department's Office of Force Transformation for inviting me to
participate in this workshop on the role of culture in
transformation.1 Too
often, discussions on transforming military capabilities focus on
the role of technology.

MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray
rightly conclude in their book, The Dynamics of Military
Revolution, 1300-2050, that from a historical perspective, adopting
new technologies alone does not account for dramatic change.2 Achieving enduring
competitive military advantages through transformation also
requires the intellectual capacity to conceptualize employing force
differently than in the pastand that may require changing
aspects of military culture.

The
premise of my remarks is that missions, strategy, education, and
organization can be instruments for changing military culture,
which, in turn, can provide new and unprecedented capabilities. I
want to argue that DOD culture does need to be changed with regard
to one mission in particular: the military's capacity to conduct
post-conflict operations.3 Traditionally, the United States plans
and executes these tasks inefficiently, jeopardizing the strategic
gains achieved through battle.

Defining Strategic Requirements

The
military's role in warfighting is unquestioned, but its
responsibilities in peace operations are both controversial and
poorly understood. Though there are no universally agreed upon
terms to describe them, military peace operations can be divided
into three types of actions: peacemaking,4 peacekeeping,5 and post-conflict activities. Of these,
arguably, post-conflict missions (as opposed to nation-building6) are the only
essential and perhaps appropriate task for U.S. forces.

Post-conflict activities are an integral
part of any military campaign in which U.S. forces are required to
seize territory, either to free an occupied country, as was the
case during the liberation of Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War, or
to dispose of an enemy regime, as during the post-war occupations
of Germany and Japan. Such missions are not "optional" operations;
they are an integral part of any military campaign.

In
addition, the initial stages of any occupation have to be primarily
a military-led effort. Only the occupation forces can provide the
security and logistics needed to get the job done and offer a focal
point for the unity of effort required to make the troubled
transition from war to peace.

While this is an inevitable task for the
U.S. military in any conflict, American troops rarely excel at this
mission. Recent operations in Iraq, for example, do not appear to
have been well organized or effectively implemented.7

I
would argue that this reflects the military's traditional approach
to post-conflict missions, which have always been ad hoc and
haphazard. The capacity to conduct post-conflict operations is one
area where the military remains significantly deficient and the
reasons for this are as much cultural as they are material.8

Among the traditions, experiences,
preconceptions, and routine practices that determine how the armed
forces conduct post-conflict operations, the most powerful force
shaping the services' thinking is a "tradition of forgetting." The
services, particularly the Army, have a long record of conducting
various kinds of peace missions. Traditionally, however, the armed
forces concentrate on warfighting and eschew the challenges of
dealing with the
battlefield after the battle.

The
Army's experience and knowledge in peace operations is a case in
point. They have never been incorporated into mainstream military
thinking in any major, systematic way. For example, the official
report on the U.S. participation in the occupation of the Rhineland
after World War I noted that, "despite the precedents of military
governments in Mexico, California, the Southern States, Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Panama, China, the Philippines, and elsewhere, the
lesson seemingly has not been learned."9

After World War I, the tradition of
forgetting continued. As the United States prepared to enter World
War II, the military discovered it had virtually no capacity to
manage the areas it would likely have to occupy. The Army did not
even a have a field manual on the subject before 1940. In fact, one
of the planners' first acts was to root out the report on lessons
learned from the Rhineland occupation.

After the Second World War, the Pentagon
largely forgot about the problem and continued to reinvent
solutions each time it faced a new peace operation. This tradition
has changed little to the present day.

Other aspects of the military's
traditional approach appear to have detrimental affects as well.
When American forces do undertake peace missions, they try, as much
as possible, to make them mirror traditional military activities.
Such an approach can result in the misapplication of resources,
inappropriate tasks and goals, and ineffective operations.

In
addition, the armed forces largely eschew integrated joint,
interagency, and coalition operations, as well as ignoring the role
of non-governmental agencies. The result is that most operations
lack cohesion, flexibility, and responsiveness.10

Changing a Military

If
we agree that the military is poorly prepared to conduct
missions--and that these are important tasks to get right--how can
we insure that the armed forces are more ready to conduct these
operations in the future?

I
would argue that the obstacles to conducting post-conflict missions
more effectively are largely cultural in origin. Therefore,
changing military culture with respect to post-conflict operations
could well require a set of initiatives that cut across the
services' education, career professional development patterns, and
organization. These innovations might include the following.

The skills needed to conduct effective
post-conflict tasks require "soft power"--not only the capacity to
understand other nations and cultures, but also the ability to work
in a joint, interagency, and multinational environment. These are
sophisticated leader and staff proficiencies, required at many
levels of command.

In the present military education system,
however, much of the edification relevant to building these
attributes is provided at the war colleges to a relatively elite
group being groomed for senior leader and joint duty positions.
This model is wrong on two counts.

First, I think these skills are needed by
most leaders and staffs in both the active and reserve
components,11 not
just an elite group within the profession.

Second, this education comes too late in
an officer's career. Virtually every other career field provides
"graduate level" education to members in their mid-20s to 30s. Only
the military delays advanced education until its leaders are in
their mid-40s.

The armed services also need special
schools specifically designed to teach the operational concepts and
practices relevant to post-conflict missions. The services already
have advanced schools (such as the Marine Corps' School for
Advanced Warfighting) for instructing in the operational arts at
their staff colleges. These courses train the military's finest
planners. The curriculum in these courses should be expanded to
include post-conflict missions.

The combatant commands12 should be reorganized to include
interagency staffs with specific responsibility for developing
post-conflict contingency plans in the same manner as current
operational staffs plan for warfighting contingencies.13 In the event of war,
the post-conflict interagency group can be attached to the
operation's joint force commander to provide the nucleus of an
occupation staff.

In addition, the joint force command
should include a general-officer deputy commander who would oversee
the work of the planning group and assume command of the occupation
force after the conflict. These staffs and command positions could
provide a series of operational assignments for the career
development of a cadre of officers especially skilled in
post-conflict duties.

The military should also retain force
training and force structure packages appropriate to post-conflict
tasks. There are three ways to obtain commands suitable to
post-conflict missions: (1) training and equipping allies to
perform these duties, (2) retraining and reorganizing U.S. combat
troops for the task, and (3) maintaining special U.S. post-conflict
forces.

I would argue that, as a great power, the
United States needs all three of these options to provide the
flexibility that will enable the nation to adapt to different
strategic situations which might require different levels of
commitments from U.S. forces. Special post-conflict units could be
assembled from existing National Guard and Reserve units including
security, medical, engineer, and public affairs commands. Since
many of the responsibilities involved in post-war duties are
similar in many ways to missions that might be required of homeland
security units, these forces could perform double duty, having
utility both overseas and at home.14

The Consequences of Cultural Change

The
21st century has not seen the last of war. Regardless of the
outcome of the current operations in Iraq, the United States will
no doubt again be called upon to conduct post-conflict tasks in the
future.

There is at least one clear lesson from
the current experience, a powerful reminder that these operations
are complex and difficult: If the United States wishes to meet
future challenges more effectively, it will have to address the
cultural impediments to providing the right kind of military
capabilities. Innovations in education, operational practices, and
organization could provide the impetus for developing an
appropriate post-conflict force for the next occupation.

James J.
Carafano, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow for National
Security and Homeland Security in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom
Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage
Foundation. These remarks were prepared for a symposium,
"Introducing Innovation and Risk: Implications of Transforming the
Culture of DOD," held by the Office of Force Transformation, U.S.
Department of Defense, at the Institute for Defense Analyses in
Arlington, Virginia.

About the Author

James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.Vice President for the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, and the E. W. Richardson Fellow

1.Transformation is
innovation on a grand scale, undertaken to exploit major changes in
the character of conflict. See testimony of Andrew F. Krepinevich
before the Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, April 9, 2002,
atwww.csbaonline.org/4Publications/ArchiveT.20020409.
Defense_Transfnrma/T.20020409.Defense_Transforma.htm.

3.Post-conflict
operations include those minimum military activities that are
required in the wake of war. After any campaign, the United States
will have moral and legal obligations to restore order, provide a
safe and secure environment for the population, ensure that people
are being fed, and prevent the spread of infectious disease. In
short, the military's task is to provide a secure atmosphere for
the reestablishment of civilian government and domestic security
and public safety regimes. In addition, maintaining a safe and
secure environment in the post-conflict phase will be vital for
ensuring the national interest that precipitated U.S. involvement
to begin with, whether that task be disarming and demobilizing an
enemy force, hunting down the remnants of a deposed regime, or
restoring a legitimate border.

4.Peacemaking involves
the use or threat of violence to compel compliance with resolutions
or sanctions designed to end conflict. These are the most
problematic of all peace operations. Maintaining neutrality is an
especially difficult challenge. This is particularly true for the
United States. As a global power with interests in virtually every
corner of the world, it is difficult to conceive of many conflicts
in which America would be seen as a neutral power. Peacemaking
should not be a routine mission for U.S. forces. See James Jay
Carafano, "The U.S. Role in Peace Operations: Past, Perspective,
and Prescriptions for the Future," Heritage Foundation Lecture No. 795, August 14, 2003, at
www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/hl795.cfm.

5.Peacekeeping operations
are undertaken with the consent of all major warring parties and
are designed simply to implement a peace agreement. The need to
conduct these operations is a matter of strategic judgment. The
United States is engaged in a global war on terrorism, a war that
may take many years and require the extensive use of our troops.
The armed forces are already straining to meet the demands of
global conflict. America needs to pace itself and reserve its
military instruments for advancing vital national interests. The
United States should refrain from taking on major roles in peace
enforcement operations. These activities offer substantially fewer
risks than peacemaking, but that means many nations with only a
modicum of military capability and some outside support can also
perform them. The United States should reserve its forces for the
great-power missions that require the preponderance of military
power that only the United States can provide. See Carafano, "The
U.S. Role in Peace Operations."

6.Nation-building
comprises a far broader range of political, military, social, and
economic tasks associated with reconstruction of a country in the
aftermath of war. Many of these activities are tasks for which
military forces are neither well-suited nor appropriate.

8.The military's
reluctance to think deeply about the place of peace operations in
military affairs derived from a rich tradition of Western military
theory, typified by the 19th century Prussian thinker Carl von
Clausewitz, who emphasized the primacy of winning battles and
destroying the enemy's conventional troops. Clausewitz, a veteran
of the Napoleonic Wars, could perhaps be forgiven for not even
mentioning peace operations in his classic treatise On War. After
all, peacekeeping operations were something new and novel in his
time, first conducted by allied forces dismantling Napoleon's
empire in 1815. Erwin A. Schmidl, "The Evolution of Peace
Operations from the Nineteenth Century," in Erwin A. Schmidl, ed.,
Peace Operations: Between War and Peace (London: Frank Cass, 2000),
p. 7. For a detailed history of the occupation of France by the
allies, see Thomas Veve, Duke of Wellington and the British Army of
Occupation in France, 1815-1818 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1992).

9.American Military
Government of Occupied Germany, 1918-1920: Report of the Officer in
Charge of Civil Affairs and Armed Forces in Germany (Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), p. 64.

10.James Jay Carafano,
Waltzing into the Cold War: The Struggle for Occupied Austria
(College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), pp. 11-13,
19-22. Typically in post-conflict planning, the U.S. military fails
to implement the lessons of previous operations, coordinates poorly
with allies and nongovernmental organizations, and participates
inadequately in interagency planning.

11.The Reserve Component,
which includes both the Reserves and the National Guard, represents
47 percent of the nation's available military forces. See James Jay
Carafano, "The Reserves and Homeland Security: Proposals, Progress,
Problems Ahead," CSBA Backgrounder, June 19, 2002, at
www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/Archive/B.20020619.The_
Reserves_and_H/B.20020619.The_Reserves_and_H.htm.

12.The combatant commands
are established under the unified command plan (UCP), a document
that describes the geographic boundaries and functions of the
combatant commands charged with conducting U.S. military operations
worldwide.